He thought at us in hissing chops,
our phones open lone black lids

& bloom our rooms with oddities,
raving cardiac tumbles into blank scrawl

that came from no place we knew,
sloughed from an under-yeared heart.

The pain pressed out from the glass,
topographical agonies in the dark,

a rake's frenzies of bleak humor
aimed at no one in particular

until it drained to a feverish bankruptcy -
he asked how M. G. died, if we thought

that's what would happen to him.
Who knows what the others thought -

I felt his mind bedded down in self,
a corner stall of gravel and nails,

tried to distract with jokes of my own,
don't know if it worked or not.

The phone in hush, the hour now
delinquent, adrift, exhausted.

In the hills, the cities: he braced us
each to the next, acid-pitted night minds.